“Earlier in the game, I flipped a ball in the right field seats to a fan. It bounced off her hands and landed on somebody’s lap. A guy reached over, a Phillies fan, reached over into her lap, grabbed the ball and then threw it back on the field.

“So in the ninth when I got the ball, I was going to flip the ball. There was a group of kids. Behind the kids there were these unruly middle-aged men that to me appeared to be snarling. It’s the ninth.

Who knows. I kind of got the sense that maybe they were intoxicated. I was going to flip it to the kids, and then I thought, maybe I shouldn’t, because of the people right behind the innocent little children there.

“So I just flipped it in the dugout. Evidently, that rubbed some people the wrong. After the events in right field, I felt it was better to maybe not throw it in the stands.”

It begs the question: did those innocent kids ever get a ball?

“I looked in after I was on first base, and Mikey [Morse] was feeding what seemed like the whole bag of balls,” Werth said. “I think he made up for it for me.”